Leila Hamilton, Restaurant Manager

A 14-year veteran of the food and hospitality industry, Leila Hamilton brings a wealth of insight and a formal culinary background to Seagrass. Raised in the Venice Beach area of Los Angeles, she took her first restaurant job waiting tables to put herself through college studying Biology at UCLA, during which time she developed an obsession for the multi-cultural cuisines a large metropolis had to offer, sparking a lifelong love of food.

Realizing food was her path, she packed up and moved in 1999 to Lawrence, Kansas where she trained as a Pastry chef. She earned numerous accolades in the Kansas City Star for her desserts at Teller’s Restaurant. Within a year, she was attending the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, NY where she received her formal training in culinary arts. Ms. Hamilton worked with famed Italian Chef Gianni Scappin at Gigi’s Trattoria in the sleepy Hudson Valley village of Rhinebeck, NY.

After finishing her culinary education, Leila moved to New York City where she continued working as a Wine Captain and Bar Manager at Oceana, a fine dining seafood restaurant under the direction of Food & Wine Magazine’s Top 10 of 2003, Chef Cornelius Gallagher. Oceana opened the world of exquisitely executed tasting menus and a wine program that remains with her to this day, inspiring a lifelong adoration of all things seafood and Eurocentric wines.

After a couple of years in New York City, graduate school took Ms. Hamilton to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York where she studied Food Science and Nutrition, among apple orchards and the finger lake wineries. At Cornell University, she studied the chemo-protective properties and pharmacological applications of polyphenols found in apples and grapes, such as resveratrol found in red wine. Though she was engrossed in the study of food in the form of science, she sorely missed the service aspect of working in a restaurant. Eventually, her intense love for food, wine and hospitality pulled her back to New York City, where she concentrated on her wine education and developed a plan to open a Belgian beer garden.

Upon return to New York City, Leila worked as a fine dining Captain at Chef Alfred Portale’s Gotham Bar & Grill, and more recently, at Chef Terrance Brennan’s Picholine near Lincoln Center. At Picholine she worked closely with famed maitre fromager Max McCalman, learning much about the art of making and pairing cheese with wine and artisanal microbrews.

Recently Leila has returned to California’s temperate climate in hopes of soaking up much of the Central Coast wine culture while she completes Master classes through the Craft Brewing Institute in Chicago to become a Master Cicerone, a beer sommelier. She is also working on a Masters certificate in Food Service Hospitality through eCornell.